The prologue describes a kid who is clearly reluctant to take his lesson in trumpet playing, especially as his neighborhood friends hail him to go with them to play a baseball game. He complains to his hectoring mother he does not like the instrument. But he would then…

The four seasons of a year, a year in the life of Ouyang Feng: this is the time frame of a story set in ancient China. Ouyang Feng has left his home region to put down his roots in a house at the edge of a desert and makes a living as a troubleshooter for the local community and people who…

What happens when love ends? Souls are wandering between drifting away and repeating the game, wary of the next move that could be a step too far either in the direction of a renewed commitment or in the direction of the final separation. Then the game stops, and…

The prologue takes place in the drab streets of Paris in 1962. Pauline, 17, chances upon Suzanne, 22, a former neighbor whom she liked but who had to move away. Both face problems. The former, a high school student, dislikes the bourgeois and conservative way of life…

First a stage director, a job that would keep him busy over a long part of his life, Ingmar Bergman becomes a movie director in 1945, age 27. He gets interested in television in 1969 and in 1973 he shoots a kind of hybrid production: “Scener ur ett äktenskap – Scenes from a Marriage”…

This third film by Philippine filmmaker Isabel Sandoval is topical to a fault. The lead character, Olivia, is a Philippine migrant who traveled to the United States, more precisely to New York, to get a job, another one among the droves of women her southeast Asian nation…

Customary pictures of a penal colony, in this case in French Guyana, with prisoners doing their chores and answering a roll call under a scorching sun, taken in medium long shots or medium shots, quickly give way to an unexpected sequence showing…

“Amarcord” is a crowd. From the start, people are teeming the streets and rushing through the squares of the Romagna’s village where the film takes place, celebrating events and attending shows, sowing mayhem in a classroom or turning into a shouting match a family lunch, an ensemble cast…

A hand moving around even as it is attached to no arm: with the strange beginning capturing this hand getting out of the fridge where it was kept along with other human body parts, especially eyeballs, looking for an escape as keenly as a prisoner, the film seems…

Exoticism and Orientalism shape the five-act narrative and the narration of what is the oldest animated feature still available and certainly one of the very first animated movie lasting more than 60 minutes. The story of the titular prince…

Galicia is a Spanish territory standing against the Atlantic Ocean and bordering on the South Portugal. A rather poor rural region with a distinct culture, it is not often surveyed by the arts and the books. It has been able to make sometimes the news outlets’ headlines…

The production started while the screenplay wasn’t ready. Costs quickly overran. Montage turned into a nightmare. The final cut was shorter than the director’s project. Success was tepid. It is not a well-liked movie. Is it worth another look?

On the face of it the feature looks like a lengthened short, a stretched observational effort that is carefully depicting the most mundane elements of the day in the life of a sales assistant in a big shop of clothes and fabrics in the big city of Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu…

“Nothing in the world can be compared to the human face. It is a land one can never tire of exploring”, Carl Theodor Dreyer once said about the importance of the human face in cinema. “Vivre sa vie” seems built and shaped around this artistic principle…

A young man walks across a field. He stops by a river to drink; when he lifts his face from the water, he sees a dead body is floating downstream. Shot in long shot and medium close shot, the opening sequence captures the tragic position of Heron de Foix. He has left Paris where he studied in order to…